'I the presidential debates, for example, more than 10m tweets were sent, with the biggest moment seeing 160k tweets per minute - double what we saw at the London Olympics when Usain Bolt was running.'

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'We work with both campaigns, and with each major news organisation, and the team all come from Capitol Hill or journalism backgrounds.

'Our goal is to help them be successful - their voters are our users.'

Sharp is confident the service will stand up during the election.

'We've been fortunate with a lot of big events this year- the Olympics, conventions and debates.

'Our infrastructure is sound we believe - it's more about making sure we are ready to give news organisations details on the conversation, and what people are talking about.

'We never make predictions, although there is an office sweepstake with a pretty broad range of numbers - but its going to be a big night for us.

'Seven hours before major networks even start their coverage we are already seeing 14,000 tweets per minute.'

The firm is urging people to use the #election2012 hashtag for political tweets so it can easily collate them

Twitter has played an instrumental part in the election.

As Stephen Mills said in the Guardian, during the election campaign US politics has shifted ‘from a 24-hour news cycle, to a 140-character one’.

Each of the candidates has tweeted throughout, and Barack Obama went as far as setting up a special office in the heart of Silicon Valley to mastermind his online assault.

Earlier his year his campaign team opened the first Technology Field Office ever to be used in a political campaign in a warehouse building in San Francisco.

Around 200 Silicon Valley CEOs, engineers and entrepreneurs attended the sold out launch event, and many have been working to spread Obama's message through technology ever since.

'We learned from 2008 that using the talents and skills of our supporters was a key to building the most effective organization,” campaign Deputy Press Secretary Katie Hogan said in a statement when it launched.

'Now we’re taking the next step by providing tools and space for supporters in the technology community to help the campaign extend our current tools like BarackObama.com and our mobile applications.'

HOW 2008 COMPARES

On election day 2008, twitter saw a total of 1.8 million Tweets.

Compare this to the 10 million Tweets during the first 90 minute debate earlier this year, and the incredible growth of the service becomes apparent.

In fact, the number of Tweets sent every 48 hours in 2012 is the same as the total number that had ever been sent on Twitter back in 2008.

While relatively few voters are on Twitter - 13 per cent of American adults according to a study by the Pew Research Centre - it's become an essential tool for campaigns.

'The subset of people on Twitter may be relatively small, but it's a politically engaged audience whose influence extends both online and off,' said Heather LaMarre, a University of Minnesota communications professor.

'It's not the direct message that has the biggest influence on people - it's the indirect message.'